The House on the Borderland with Original Foreword by Jonathan Maberry

By William Hope Hodgson

"A work that leads us to the very rim of the unknown." –H.P. Lovecraft

What does the edge of early 19th-century reality look like? Step into The House on the Borderland, where Hodgson's genius blurs reality and fiction at the crossroads of Victorian Gothic moodiness and new-age science. This newly refined edition, with insights from horror icon Jonathan Maberry, defines a genre.

The story begins with the discovery of a manuscript amidst odd ruins. Within its damp pages is an unfathomable tale: A recluse and his dog confront shifting dimensions of spacetime and otherworldly horrors in their forsaken, remote house, exposing a ragged swath of the unknown that lurks just at the edge of reality.

Hodgson, often named the "father of weird fiction," inspired H.P. Lovecraft, of Cthulhu Mythos fame. Rediscover the novel that Lovecraft described as a profound influence. It's a work that reshapes reality itself, a stormy night must-read for those seeking a blend of Stephen King's thrill and Lovecraft's depth.

An oddly inspiring journey of weird science fiction awaits you. Rediscover a classic masterpiece that continues to mesmerize readers today. Open the door and approach the secrets within The House on the Borderland.

It's a timeless experience that will change you forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WordFire Press
• Release date: May 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9781680576511

Book preview

The House on the Borderland

The House on the Borderland

William Hope Hodgson

Edited by

Jenn Fir

Foreword by

Jonathan Maberry

WordFire Press

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson

Originally published in 1908. This work is in the public domain.

This new edition edited by Jenn Fir

Foreword copyright © 2024 by Jonathan Maberry

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

The ebook edition of this book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold, or given away. If you would like to share the ebook edition with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-68057-651-1

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68057-652-8

Jacketed Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68057-653-5

Illustrations and figures are in the public domain.

Cover design by Jenn Fir and Allyson Longueira

Cover art by grandfailure | Depositphotos

Published by WordFire Press, LLC

P.O. Box 1840

Monument, CO 80132

Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

WordFire Press Edition 2024

Printed in the USA

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Contents

Foreword

To My Father

Author’s Introduction

I

THE FINDING OF THE MANUSCRIPT

II

THE PLAIN OF SILENCE

III

THE HOUSE IN THE ARENA

IV

THE EARTH

V

THE THING IN THE PIT

VI

THE SWINE THINGS

VII

THE ATTACK

VIII

AFTER THE ATTACK

IX

IN THE CELLARS

X

THE TIME OF WAITING

XI

THE SEARCHING OF THE GARDENS

XII

THE SUBTERRANEAN PIT

XIII

THE TRAP IN THE GREAT CELLAR

XIV

THE SEA OF SLEEP

The Fragments

XV

THE NOISE IN THE NIGHT

XVI

THE AWAKENING

XVII

THE SLOWING ROTATION

XVIII

THE GREEN STAR

XIX

THE END OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM

XX

THE CELESTIAL GLOBES

XXI

THE DARK SUN

XXII

THE DARK NEBULA

XXIII

PEPPER

XXIV

THE FOOTSTEPS IN THE GARDEN

XXV

THE THING FROM THE ARENA

XXVI

THE LUMINOUS SPECK

Conclusion

Grief

Footnotes

Publisher’s Note

About the Author

About the Editor

WordFire Classics

Foreword

Jonathan Maberry

I was a weird child. No denying it.

I could say that I was led astray down shadowy paths by adults who wanted to twist the mind of a credulous youngster. But that’s not entirely true. I followed willingly because those darkened paths often took me deep into haunted places filled with books. Libraries of one kind or another. And for a kid growing up in poverty and with a dreadful beast of a father, those places of books were my sanctuary.

I was safe there. I was welcome there.

Libraries, in all of their varieties, were my home. The books whispered secrets to me. The opened covers of those books were escape hatches into other places, other experiences, other whens and wheres.

The truth is that I have always been drawn to such places because my first and primary goal in life was to write strange tales. It took me quite a few decades to reach the goal of being a full-time working writer, and there were some odd side adventures along the way. I spent years as a bodyguard. I taught jujutsu at the local and university level. I worked questionable jobs, such as being a bouncer in a very violent strip club; I wrote response scripts for pharmaceutical adverse experience call centers; I did some musical theater. I even wrote sarcastic greeting cards. It wasn’t until I was 48 before I published my first novel.

Now, writing novels, short stories, articles, nonfiction books, and comics is my job. My career. My life.

And I am surrounded by books.

Shelves upon shelves of them. Cases of them in each room. A surprising number of them are my own work.

But filling out most of those bookshelves are works by writers whose strange imaginings drew me through the escape hatches and into other worlds.

Not that the worlds into which I set foot were exactly all spring flowers and puppies. Hardly that. More often than not, they were shadowy suburbs where people often wind up because they started out with poor choices, awful luck, or bad directions.

Aiding and abetting me were people like my grandmother, who was an old-lady version of Luna Lovegood from the Harry Potter novels. She believed in absolutely everything and the things that went bump in the night were as much a comfort to her as they became to me. Another guide along those crooked ways were my childhood friends and mentors, L. Sprague de Camp, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Lin Carter, George Scithers, and others.

Most of those folks were, in one way or another, associated with Weird Tales Magazine, for which I am now editor. One of the things that made Weird Tales so successful, and which has allowed it to endure for more than a century, is the fact that the darkest and inarguably strangest tales of horror, mystery, science fiction, and fantasy appeared in its pages.

And it was in those pages where I first encountered William Hope Hodgson.

To clarify up front, Hodgson never sold to Weird Tales, having died in 1918, five years before the magazine was launched. However, one of his stories, The Hog, was published posthumously in the January 1947 issue of Weird Tales.

It was my first exposure to the writer and his vision. The story was one of Hodgson’s popular adventures of Thomas Carnacki, an occult detective who is, in many ways, a prototype of that kind of supernatural investigator. It pitted Carnacki against a bizarre supernatural threat in the form of a gigantic nightmare hog spirit. I read it when I was 13 and was excited by the unconventional nature of the monster, and the implications of a larger and more bizarre cosmology than was common in the stories I had so far read.

I went looking for more, but at the time (this was in 1971), there was no collection of Carnacki stories to be found in any local library. When I complained about this to de Camp, he said he’d bring me something. The next time I saw him—at a meeting of the Hyborean Legion, a group of swords and sorcery writers that met in my hometown of Philadelphia—I was at first disappointed because the volume he handed me was not about Carnacki. It was a novel. One of the old Ace paperbacks from 1965. Moreover, it had a blurb on the cover by none other than H.P. Lovecraft, who wrote: …a classic of the first water.

That book was The House on the Borderland, first published in 1908.

De Camp had introduced me to the Lovecraft earlier that year, and I had devoured his collected works, branching from there out to Lovecraft’s many followers, a group of writers that included August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and others. I understood the value of an endorsement of Lovecraft. De Camp pointed out, though, that Hodgson had died before Lovecraft created what has become known as the Cthulhu Mythos. He explained that Hodgson was an influence on Lovecraft. That blew my mind.

I took the book home, and as it was halfway to Halloween, I took it to a local park, sat under a tree whose leaves were painted in every conceivable color, took frequent sips of Hires root beer and crunched Cracker Jacks, and dug in.

Time became meaningless.

The House on the Borderland is not a long book, but definitely substantial. From the ominous opening pages about a creepy house in rural Ireland, I was drawn in. Hodgson’s writing varied in style from ornate mood-building to weird action to runs of complex introspection. It was obvious that Lovecraft had drawn inspiration from Hodgson without trying to copy that style. I rather liked that because I’m not a fan of imitation.

It's a tough book to explain to casual reader friends because it had elements of late Victorian Gothic moodiness along with the ‘modernist’ viewpoint common to writers of the early 20th century. Hodgson was a young man who died at age forty. He was a sailor, fitness enthusiast, and world traveler, but there were echoes of his having been the son of an Anglican priest and also some evident scars of someone who had endured mistreatment and bullying. The bones of the man were what supported the meat of his novel.

That complex background informed the uniqueness of his literary style. He wrote like himself, copying no one else in any intrusive way. That said, there are echoes of Jules Verne and Edgar Allen Poe in his phrasing and pacing. There was some of H.G. Wells’ vision and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s pragmatism.

But it was all Hodgson.

Contextually, The House on the Borderland is part of the library of works that helped form the meta-genre we now call cosmic horror. It’s pretty evident that Hodgson had read Robert W. Chamber’s brilliant collection of interconnected stories published as The King in Yellow (1895), which many writers of cosmic horror regard as a foundational work. And there’s a hint of Arthur Machen’s wild The Great God Pan (1890-94).

It was later that I realized the likely influence of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) and Jules Verne’s semi-fanfic novel, An Antarctic Mystery (1897).

But although Hodgson may have been influenced by elements of each of these works, The House on the Borderland stands easily on its own. There is no novel quite like it.

Not being a fan of spoilers, I won’t give away the juicy plot details. However, there are keep points of interest that are sharp enough to pique the interest of readers. In terms of themes, it broke away from the Victorian Gothic structure and brought in the scientific sensibilities of the early 20th century. It is very much a novel of the new century, and in that, we see what would become a roadmap for Lovecraft, for his tales of Cthulhu and the various Great Old Ones, Outer Gods, Elder Things, and other pantheons of cosmicism. Those novels were actually science fiction since these cosmic beings are not truly gods but aliens of such power that they are indistinguishable from true deities. That brings to mind a quote by Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote, Magic’s just science we don’t yet understand and Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Hodgson had that in his head many decades before Clarke framed it.

The novel deals with science as much as magic. It deals with the unknown, and, though there are unknowable elements, it’s implied that those secrets may one day be unlocked.

At the same time, it’s a horror novel. The things the protagonist encounters would blast the mind of a Victorian, but does not destroy the sanity of someone with both feet planted in the 20th century. Hodgson got that, and even 116 years later, his clarity and understanding shine through.

Hodgson explores the concepts of a multidimensional universe with doorways accessible in dreams and imagination. He excites us with the possibility of a much, much larger and more complex universe than science can currently explain. He allows us to feel wonder at the possibilities of it, while also letting the novel serve as a kind of cautionary tale, suggesting that once a doorway between worlds is open, it remains so…and that door can swing both ways.

I remember once speaking about the book to two legendary creators of weird stories—Richard Matheson and George R. Romero. A year after I read The House on the Borderland, I mentioned it to Matheson at another writers’ gathering. He fanboyed over it and confessed that the pale-faced, nearly brain-dead vampires assaulting the fortified home of his protagonist in I Am Legend (1954) were inspired in part by a scene in Hodgson’s book, where pale creatures lay a similar siege. Many years later, when I had become a friend and collaborator with Romero on our anthology, Nights of the Living Dead (2017), I brought up Hodgson’s books and Matheson’s comments. He laughed and said that he unapologetically borrowed from Matheson for his flesh-eating ghouls attacking the farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead, and that he felt little guilt over it because Matheson had so clearly borrowed from Hodgson.

Funny old world.

The book you’re holding is a brand-new edition of that classic work. As I write this in my home office overlooking the blue Pacific here in San Diego, I can still feel the chilly October breeze that rustled the dying leaves of the tree against which I sat with my root beer and candy and first read The House on the Borderland. I remember the excitement of Hodgson’s engaging style. I remember the creeps I got from the swine-monsters and other creatures. I recall the goosebumps and the disquiet and how both reactions made me keep reading and reading.

I hope you find a quiet place—maybe a dark reading nook, or in bed with almost all the lights out—and allow yourself to be pulled into the story and from there into the dreamlike other dimension. I hope you follow willingly where William Hope Hodgson dares you to go. And I envy you this first encounter.

Turn the page….

Jonathan Maberry

San Diego, CA, 2023

From the Manuscript discovered in 1877

by Messrs. Tonnison and Berreggnog

in the Ruins that lie to the South

of the Village of Kraighten,

in the West of Ireland.

Set out here, with Notes.

To My Father

(Whose feet tread the lost aeons)

Open the door,

And listen!

Only the wind’s muffled roar,

And the glisten

Of tears ’round the moon.

And, in fancy, the tread

Of vanishing shoon⁠—

Out in the night with the Dead.

Hush! And hark

To the sorrowful cry

Of the wind in the dark.

Hush and hark, without murmur or sigh,

To shoon that tread the lost aeons:

To the sound that bids you to die.

Hush and hark! Hush and Hark!

—Shoon of the Dead

Author’s Introduction

TO THE MANUSCRIPT

MANY ARE the hours in which I have pondered upon the story that is set forth in the following pages. Once and again, in my post as Editor, have I been tempted to (if I may coin so ungracious a word) literarise it: but I trust that my instincts are not awry when they prompt me to leave the account, in simplicity, as it was handed to me.

And the MS. itself—You must picture me, when first it was given into my care, turning it over, curiously, and making a swift, jerky examination. A small book it is; but thick, and all, save the last few pages, filled with a quaint but legible handwriting, and writ very close. I have the queer, faint, pit-water smell of it in my nostrils now as I write, and my fingers have subconscious memories of the soft, cloggy feel of the long-damp pages.

I recall, with just a slight effort, my first impression of the worded contents of the book—an impression of the fantastic, gathered from casual glances, and an unconcentrated attention.

Then, conceive of me comfortably a-seat for the evening, and the little, squat book and I, companions for some close, solitary hours. And the change that came upon my judgments! The emergence of a half-belief. From a seeming fantasia there grew, to reward my unbiased concentration, a cogent, coherent scheme of ideas that gripped my interest more securely than the mere bones of the account or story, whichever it be, and I confess to an inclination to use the first term. I found a greater story within the lesser—and the paradox is no paradox.

I read, and, in reading, lifted the Curtains of the Impossible, that blind the mind, and looked out